Introduction

pp. 1-5

in: Patrick Parrinder, Authors and authority, Basingstoke, Palgrave Macmillan, 1991

Abstract

Prophet or pedant; interpreter or judge; the critic stands, often uncomfortably, between Joyce's two aphorisms. Criticism of literature occupies the space between our modern concepts of "author" and "authority" — concepts which in the romance languages share the same root in the Latin verb augeo. There is a primal sense, perhaps, in which the auctor or creator, whether of narratives, laws or merchandise, possessed all the "authority" that there was to be had. But as civilisation proceeded by the progressive division of labour, one kind of authority came to be pitted against another. The native force of the maker or originator was brought up against the common standards of society. Scholars find the origins of literary criticism in scattered comments on writers and texts; perhaps the first substantial critic is Aristophanes, who discusses the relative merits of Aeschylus, Sophocles and Euripides.¹ But the traces of a still earlier situation are present in the first document of criticism which still has a living force: the discussion of poetry and poets in Plato's Republic. Plato speaks of the "old quarrel between philosophy and poetry". In Book Three, he examines poetry from the standpoint of the interests of the state, and gives the classical exposition of the theory of censorship. In Book Ten, as if dissatisfied with this, he returns to the subject and discusses the intrinsic nature of art in terms of representation. But Plato himself has traditionally been understood as the most poetic and imaginative of philosophers. If this is accepted, he can be seen to fulfil all three of the possible roles of author, of spokesman for external (and ultimately political) authority, and of critic or aesthetician occupying the middle ground. In the latter role, he acknowledges the seductive "natural magic" of poetry, but balances this against the demands of the reason before concluding that poetry ought to be banned. Of course, Plato's Republic is an imaginary city, a pattern laid up in heaven. But in the last two hundred and fifty years literary criticism, or the activity of rationalising the creative practice of literature, has lost its innocence and acquired a political dimension. Its modern history involves the history of culture itself, and of the idea of culture, as well as of particular individuals, doctrines and approaches.